witchcraft – Page 20 – Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

Shaping and Shielding I: The Old Days

Satyr Magos06/10/2012

The first person I ever met who shared my interest in magic and the occult was a young man I’ll call Shire. We were sixteen, maybe fifteen years old when we our curiosity blossomed into outright experimentation. I don’t remember, now, what his framework was, but I was already identifying as Pagan. I came from a generic Protestant background, more informed by the Boy Scouts and television than by any churching; his mother was a hardcore White Light New Ager. Our experiments began with the most basic elemental conjuration you can imagine: holding our hands over candles and bowls of tap water, trying to absorb and tune to Elemental Fire and Water. He was more sensitive; I was better at focusing and projecting power.

Like most young men with an interest in the occult, especially in the Midwest of the early 1990s, I exhibited a certain paranoia: I was convinced that there were spiritual forces arrayed against me, and I focused much of my time and attention on the creation of protection spells and psychic shields, and on developing ways to penetrate or circumvent them. To this day, I remain one of the most skilled magicians I know (at least in meatspace) when it comes to building and dismantling magical protections.

My first shields were formed by visualizing myself in a suit of armor. I don’t know where I got this idea. This was before I owned any books beside the “Simonomicon”, so if I didn’t come up with it on my own, I must have gotten it off of one of the message boards I was frequenting in those days. Because I was a serious geek back in the day, my armor looked something like this:

My earliest magical attacks were “swords” I held in my hands, soon replaced by a knife-like formation that I would throw.

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Empathy and Other Psychic Senses

Satyr Magos05/10/2012

Half a lifetime ago, when I was but a wee faun of a mage, I had a number of talents that bore little resemblance or relevance to the sort of power I wanted as a practitioner of magic. I had no access to whatever community elders there may have been, and the internet was not the deep well of knowledge it is today.(1) It was my first year of high school and, although I cracked my first book on astrology at the age of thirteen, I had been practicing magic for no more than nine months—probably just since the beginning of the summer—with a repertoire limited to a stripped-out version of the LBRP which I had found on a message board, and about the most simple elemental energy-work you can imagine. My chief occult interests at that time were circles of protection, the sort of aura sight seen in bad martial arts anime, and astral projection.

I was totally unprepared for the full panorama of what psychic senses really feel like. To this day, one of my very few crystal-clear memories of high school is of walking down the hall, looking at people and knowing things: “They’re really in love.” “They’re not, but they’re having sex.” “She’s cheating on him.” These thoughts, these knowings, were alien to me: I didn’t know the students in question, and I would not discover my taste for gossip for another five or six years. But I was absolutely certain of each and every thing that burst into my mind as I turned my gaze on each set of couples I passed on my way to English class. The knowing, the invasion of those unwitting people’s privacy, terrified me. I shoved the knowledge out of my head, and slammed the door closed behind it.

Over the course of the next two years, as I met more and more magical practitioners, several of them were the sort that identified as “empaths”. In particular, one of my close friends and mentors. The talent never seemed to bring him much pleasure, so at first I felt that I’d made the right call … but around the time I graduated high school, I started to wonder what I was missing.

Medeia had a friend—an off-and-on student and lover—that we hung out with some times. Hearing the above story, he offered to help me out. Unfortunately, as it turned out, he was less than helpful. His solution was brute force: we sat down and entered a trance; I let him into my head; he found the door, and kicked it in. It hurt, and I panicked, and tried to slam it shut. But the “door” was broken, now, and wouldn’t close all the way.

My practice was never very regular back in the day. It certainly wasn’t founded on banishing or meditation. If it had been, that shit might have just sorted itself out on its own, before I blew my circuit-breaker. Even after that dramatic event, my psychic senses have always been a little wonky. I have experienced “empathy” not as a knowledge of what others are feeling, but a direct, vicarious, and often unknowing and unwelcome experience of it: I walk into a room where someone’s in a bad mood, and suddenly so am I. Of course I always picked up unpleasant emotions first, and often exclusively. Living with Aradia, we frequently shared physical pains, and occasionally panic attacks. And you, my dear readers, may recall some complaints about the psychic toxicity of the mall.

Shielding is the answer, of course. It’s time for the next round of experiments to begin.

1 – These were the wild, early days of IRC and CompuServe. HTML was shiny and new. FTP was the preferred method of sharing files, and GOPHER was still relevant. The internet was so small that there were published books of internet addresses, much like a Yellow Pages, and people used them. I’ll stop now before I make anyone else feel even older than I already do typing out this footnote.

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a View of the Sunrise Temple

Satyr Magos04/10/2012

I rebuilt my altar at the Full Moon. It actually took the whole weekend before I was completely satisfied with the setup.

Behold: the magical engine of the Sunrise Temple. The main altar is on the left, which you have seen several incarnations of before now. To the immediate right of it are my jugs of mead, happily fermenting by the heater. Beside that is a shelf of candles, stones, incense, and other supplies that don’t live in the kitchen cabinets. Behind and above the shelves and mead are the maps which represent either my actual area of influence—that is, the places I have lived and where I still have friends and family—and the world I wish to influence with my political enchantments. And finally, furthest right, is my newly erected seasonal altar; that table housed my chaos altar before it was pointed out to me that an altar dedicated to Chaos Magick is … almost oxymoronic.

Having taken down the Chaos altar, the Baphomet mask now lives atop my altar with Dionysus, Hephaestus, Rhea, and Athena. ZG and SKM now share an alcove, and Sue—the spirit I work with more than any other—has one to herself. The cubes on the side have been rearranged so that my money-drawing spell—which will soon be upgraded to a Jupiter cahsbox, a la Strategic Sorcery(1)—can have it’s own space. The cube across from it is being converted into a home for all my sexual enchantments—the vast majority of which are targeted at staying child- and STI-free. Below the financial altar are the ever-evolving house wards, and below the sex are my Tarot cards, visionary mask and pipe, and my black mirror. My various planetary talismans have been relocated to the center base, with my God and Goddess figures elevated above them, along with my World Tree. The flat workbench area is largely unaltered.

The first stirrings of my Samhain altar are very simple. My death mask and sickle/knife, a picture of my dead grandmother and tokens of lost friends and loved ones. I want to add gourds and pomegranates, but first I need to take care of my fruit fly problem. Also poverty.

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Rubble, Toil, and Trouble

Satyr Magos03/10/2012

When I said I hit a wall a couple weeks ago, it was even more true than I realized at the time. The cold I was fighting weakened me slowly, until Tuesday when I was too sick to go to class. When the fever passed, it was followed by a wave of insomnia and depression. Although I’ve managed to largely maintain my banishing practice (about three days out of five), meditation not on the weekends has been sporadic at best, as has dream journaling.

In line with the depression has been the bouts of obsessive behavior: after buying and finally watching the Avengers when it came out on DVD last week, I proceeded to plow through the Marvel Ultimate reboot—an exceptionally dystopian vision, full of (and uncritical of) contempt for consent and creepy sex-negativity, which did nothing whatsoever for my state of mind. I’ve dreamed about superheroes for at least three of the last seven nights. I don’t think the Chaos Magic is in any way to blame for this round of madness and obsession: I think the length of time since I last saw my lovers, and my paucity of friends on campus, are owed full credit.

In the middle of all this madness, though, was some actual interesting and productive work. I have begun experimenting with psychic shields again for the first time in years. I make very, very effective shields, but I hesitate to say that I’m “good” at it: when they’re up, it’s like living in a mad tyrant’s castle: nothing gets in, nothing gets out … even if it probably ought to. But the escalating magic of the last couple years has re-opened psychic senses that I don’t want to loose again, either through atrophy or burn-out, and re-learning effective shielding has become an imperative. That’s a post in and of itself.

This weekend, I honored the Full Moon by completely disassembling and cleaning my altars and by putting them back together in a slightly more effective arrangement. I started two batches of mead. And I have successfully incorporated underworld journeys into two Esbats in a row, now, culminating in a journey into the very strange places opened up in my Inner Temple by my self-initiation into the Chaos Current. No, that wasn’t what I was trying to do there, exactly, but … that’s basically what it amounted to. That, too, deserves a post unto itself.

After firing off a few rounds of sigils, things in my life are starting to get moving. I need to keep at it: exercising my will and manifesting the world I want. A lot of the specific desires have not yet manifested fully, but they’re complex and delicate this time, and I’m not in a hurry. I can see things working and that’s good enough for me. Fuller reports will become available as they manifest.

All this has put me a little behind on my original schedule, and it’s time for me to start in on Liber Lux and Nox if I’m to have any chance of being even half done by the end of October. The madness and illness, though, are not actually to blame for that tardiness. Instead, they share a common cause: I’ve overextended myself a bit this semester. I’ve almost got a handle on the work load, and I should be okay by the time I’m done with Midterms, but … well, I’ve already complained about that shit enough, here and elsewhere. Unfortunately, everything has to take a back seat to my classes.

In witchcraft

Ow. That Was A Wall

Satyr Magos23/09/2012

I got nothing done for Project Null this week: Tuesday through Friday were a complete wash. In a small part, that can be blamed on my frustration with the unsatisfying results of the sigil shoal I launched a couple weeks ago. Mostly, though, it was because I spent all my time and energy on my anthropology of gender class. In related news, I am now ill, but on the plus side I got a lot of great material for my Feminism as Chaos Magick essay (and narrowly avoided a tumblr fight in the process).

The Sorcerer’s Secrets finally shipped Thursday. Friday morning, the lost keys I was looking for did finally appear in a pocket of my backpack that I’m fairly sure I checked. I have found about a dollar’s worth of change on the ground. So: it seems like these things took about ten days to manifest. Perhaps I phrased my intent poorly, or chose targets that were problematic for reasons I don’t understand. Perhaps the sigil designs were somehow inadequate. Perhaps the launch technique was inadequate. Or maybe it just takes that long, even when a shorter time table is encoded in the sigil. For lack of adequate data, I’m going to assume a combination of all of the above was at fault and mark the experiment as “mixed results”

I did get my act back together yesterday morning and today: doing my meditations, making my weekend offerings, and firing a shoal of sigils each morning using a simpler charging technique: still charged from my morning rituals, I arranged the sigils on my Chaos Altar, lit a candle each for Death and Desire, held the sigils up to the sunrise, and chanted “It is my will” until I felt something shift. When each of the sigils was so charged, I lit a third candle, again chanting “It is my will” until I felt a shift. The first shoal was socially oriented: knowing who wants to fuck me, who I can trust, and that sort of thing. The second was more academic: improved comprehension, reading speed, and recall.

Because I seem to be much better at actually doing my meditation first thing in the morning, I am going to add that to my morning routine, as well as try for a second 5 minutes at night.

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Libra Dark Moon Reading

Satyr Magos20/09/2012

I did a reading last month. I didn’t even look at it a second time after laying the cards down, let alone actually try to suss out any nuance. Pretty much the same story the month before.

This month’s reading, then, is exceptionally lacking in temporal context. As usual, I’ve used the Twelve Houses spread with my custom addition of the central portion of the Celtic Cross to the center.

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Project Null: Settling Into the Groove

Satyr Magos16/09/2012

I have just completed the third week of my Project Null experiment. Some things have been settling down, others have been rearing their heads.

I’ve been escalating my daily banishing ritual a little bit, and doing better about my meditation, which has had a positive effect on the paranoia. Perfecting my sleeping tea and being ruthless about bedtime (“ruthless”, because my homework is suffering) have helped with the insomnia and the nightmares.

My patience with various frustrations is at a distinct low point. A class that I had hoped would be a fun challenge has, so far, turned out to be neither fun nor challenging, and another that should have been a coast-through is giving me trouble because the teacher seems to be suffering from part-timer syndrome. These are legitimate frustrations. My desire to set something on fire over them are just a little bit out of proportion. With that said: I’ve suffered from rage issues for my whole life, so this is nothing new to me. Stress makes me angry. This is probably related to the Chaos experiment only insomuch as my meditation practice is making it impossible to deny or sublimate the rage.

Over the course of the week, I pushed a little further in Stephen Mace, restarted reading Hine’s Condensed Chaos, read Carol’s Liber KKK, and re-read Gordon’s Sigils Reboot.

Meditation

For most of the week, my meditation practice was the best it had ever been. I was making five minutes or more at least once a day. I wasn’t necessarily having great insights—really, just the Abrasax thing—but my mind was getting less and less unruly. Then, Thursday, I fell off the horse for no reason. No meditation Thursday or Friday.

This morning and yesterday, it’s distraction city all over again. With the noted addition of a distinct buzz at the end of every meditation session, which is interesting and might be good or bad.

Magic

At the beginning of this experiment, I took a bit of a hiatus from active magical practice. I have begun re-incorporating magic into my practice, and the results have been decidedly mixed. I dove back in to magic head-first Monday, with the Mercury Cazimi election just before dawn followed by the Mass of Chaos B that afternoon to fire off some sigils. The first was a success; the second, not so much.

I made use of the Mercury election to recharge all my various Mercury talismans and to create a new language-learning talisman. Although the raw power of that election made it very easy for me to feel the dissonance between my retrograde natal Mercury and the planetary power, the enchantments went well. I have felt a distinct improvement in my ability to communicate with other humans (except over electronic media, which seems to be suffering an increased confusion, but there are a LOT of confounding factors making that correlation pretty blurry), and my comprehension of Greek and Latin does seem to be improving at a slightly swifter rate.

The Mass of Chaos B sigil launch was a qualified disaster. I had three desires: to have a lost set of keys returned to me by Thursday, to have an Amazon package that has been waiting in the dock for (I though) no good reason shipped that day, and to find money on the ground. The keys have still not been returned to me; Amazon has finally deigned to tell me that the reason my package didn’t ship is that The Sorcerer’s Secrets is currently out of stock; and I found a grand total of $0.06 on the ground this week.

So … I think I’m going to back up with my sigils. Try launch techniques which are a little more traditional. And hopefully aim my intentions a little better.

Meanwhile, the changes to my morning banishing rites have definitely left me feeling much more powerful. I’ve yet to see that improved sense of power translate into actual results, though.

Dreaming

The tea I’ve been using to help regulate my sleep schedule has really fucked my dream journaling. While on the one hand, my dreams have been vivid and interesting, on the other hand, I have been consistently woken up by the alarm which drives whatever I’ve been dreaming out of my head pretty much every time.

Have I mentioned before that dreamwork is not a native talent of mine?

Hopefully, the next batch of dream tea will cause me fewer problems: 2 tbs valerian; 1 tbs each white willow, chamomile; 2 tsp mugwort; 1 tsp spearmint. I will be brewing does of 1 tbs in 2 cups filtered water.

In witchcraft

Titan’s Cross 2.0

Satyr Magos13/09/2012

I’ve mentioned before, both pointedly and in passing, that the Judeo-Christian frame of much ceremonial magic does not work well for me. My attempts to reframe Golden Dawn and ceremonial rituals into my own neo-Pagan cosmology have been guided more by instinct and intuition than by research, and they have met with mixed results. My Pentagram Rite, for example, works better for me than the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram ever did, and without the unfortunate side effects. The Titan’s Cross, however, while more aesthetically pleasing than the traditional Qabalistic Cross, never really had the same “umph”.

Last week, however, I had a sort of break through. Sitting out on the campus lawn, doing my Liber MMM meditation(1) under the sun, the name Abraxas came to mefrom nowhere(2). The creative juices started flowing, the synchretism got hot and heavy, and the following ritual is the result.

The Titan’s Cross: Satyr Magos’ Morning Invocation

I begin by forming a banishing pentagram and stepping into it to flush my aura.

I reach into the sky and intone(3) the name PHANES as the winged figure of Eros Protogonos descends into you from above.

Drawing my hand down my body, I reach toward the earth and intone the name GE, as the body of the earth opens and engulfs me.

Reaching out my left hand(4), I intone the name HELIOS as a sphere of solar light ignites there and envelops me.

Reaching out my right hand(5), I intone the name SELENE as a sphere of lunar light waxes into being and envelops me.

Brining my palms together I take a deep breath of that cumulative power and intone ABRASAX(6)

Finally, within another full breath, I intone IAO.

1 – Five minutes a day of motionless breathing concentration.

2 – Well, not quite out of nowhere. Rufus Opus had just mentioned him a few days before.

3 – Or “vibrate”, as it’s called in many circles. For some reason that word makes my skin itch. Probably because a lot of twits use the word too much.

4 – Because I have a solar tattoo on my left shoulder, and wear my Solar Talisman on my left hand.

5 – Because I have a lunar tattoo on my right shoulder. Yes, this is a deliberate inversion that throws of a hillarious and disturbing number of people.

6 – Why Abrasax not Abraxas? Because that’s what came to me. Gotta roll with the UPG when it comes to you, folks.

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Dissonance and Resonance

Satyr Magos09/09/2012

I have been practicing magic for just shy of sixteen years. I’ve seen some whack-ass shit—some of it way back in the day, some of it a little more recently. I even burned out the circuitry in my own brain on one occasion, a psychic injury from which I have only fully recovered in the last two years. Fuck: I spent the first five or eight years of my magical practice with no other goal than to get some sort of hold on what currently passes for my sanity. So when Peter Carroll tells me that Chaos Magick can lead to paranoia and obsession and outright madness, my first reaction is, “Been there. Done that.”

Oops. Stultus sum.

I have spent the last week struggling with depression and paranoia far out of line with my circumstances. Also, a round of insomnia which has driven me to work on perfecting my sleeping tea and which has rendered me almost incapable of focusing on my studies. Small noises in and outside my apartment have sent me into fits, searching for the source. I have heard things scratching at the doors and walls. In the moments between sleep and waking, I am haunted by delusions that someone or something is trying to break into the apartment. My dreams have been haunted by fear, death, and betrayal.

Yes, I have things to be depressed about. I have abandoned one lover, for a second time, in a far-away city; I have stayed in place as another moves on to bigger and better things. That these things are inevitable, and the only path to each of us furthering our ambitions, is little consolation: I miss them. Beyond that, finances are tight. I didn’t make enough money over the summer, leaving with debt at the beginning and my costs have risen. I’ve secured a TA position, which will provide me more hours than my post office position last year, but it’s still minimum-wage work-study.

There’s also stress. I’m studying two dead languages at once, which is a kind of mind fuck. I’m learning to weave, which is relatively straightforward on the one hand, but hugely time consuming. And I’m taking an upper-level class outside my field: Gender Studies, as a point of fact, which while somewhat familiar territory as a queer feminist, is rightly known as a field of particularly difficult-to-read theory.

But these very real factors are not sufficient to account for the degree of madness I’ve been struggling against, or the perfect (if short-lived) efficacy of banishing and/or meditation as a method of managing it.

All this, and I haven’t even performed my initiation in to the Chaos Current, yet, or the Mass of Chaos B for a second time?

Fuck. Me. Running.

I just hope that if I do go off the deep end, there’ll be someone left in my life to send in a rescue party.

Meditation

My meditation has been going fabulously. I have missed only one day this week—Monday—and I have meditated in excess of 30 minutes on two occasions: almost exactly half an hour Tuesday night, before sleep; and a somewhat harder to quantify amount Friday afternoon at the loom, made up of uncounted three to eight minute intervals as I lost myself in the rhythm of the shuttle and reed.

Which is fucking good, because, as I said above, it’s been the front line of defense against the hordes of my internal demons.

Magic

I have been banishing and refining my Q-Cross every day, but done little other active magic this week. What I have done is dwell upon Chaos Magick, its paradigms, and Project Null. Having produced the first half-dozen glyphs of my Sacred Alphabet, I must now begin to conceive of how it will grow. I have also been preparing for Monday morning’s Mercury Cazimi election.

And, of course, as is my custom, I spend Friday night cleaning and smudging my apartment. I also performed a couple banishings..

The most concrete product of these musings and meditations can be seen in the image at the top: a syncretic chaosphere for Aradia, myself, and anyone else who chooses to join in with Project Null. An image, a sigil if you will, to help unite and power our efforts. Our own little runoff stream of the Chaos current.

Dream

Although my dreams have been consistently violent, they have only been clear enough to record after waking about every other day. I’m always vague in the mornings; it’s twice as bad when I actually wake up with the alarm, rather than before, and that is always the case when I have to dose myself in order to sleep.

For the curious: the tea I’ve been drinking has been valerian, mugwort, and white willow at at 2:1:1 ratio. Last night I added 1/2 part mint and reduced the dose from 4 tsp to 3, which has produced the best results so far. Mugwort tea gave me nightmares as a teen, too, but almost never since.

In witchcraft

Paper Talismans, Satyr-Style

Satyr Magos08/09/2012

As you may note by looking to the right, I am a member of Christopher Warnock’s Spiritus Mundi mailing list. I’m not very active—I don’t know enough about traditional astrology to participate(1)—but I do like to take advantage of the elections he and his students are kind enough to share. Many of the folks on the Spiritus Mundi group, like myself, are too poor to create talismans of precious metals. So there’s a lot of talk about paper talismans. So much so, in fact, that Mr. Warnock has recently posted a page on the history and construction of paper talismans.

The prevailing wisdom on the mailing list is that paper talismans are good for 90 days. My own experience has been radically different: although my Jupiter talisman, made back in April, did require a bit of a boost over the summer, it is still going strong.

So as I gear up for Monday morning’s Mercury election (the last Hour of Night, just before dawn), I thought I would share the process that is working so well for me.

I start with two unlined notecards. I mark one as the front and one as the back: if I’m going to print them off (which I have done in the past) I’ll prepare everything the day before in an openoffice document(2); this weekend, as I’m out of printer ink and money, I’ll be hand-drawing them in pencil to be inked and colored at the electional moment. If I don’t already have an appropriate planetary incense on hand, I’ll gather the herbs and resins for that, as well, also to be mixed at the time of the election. Finally you need glue; I prefer rubber cement.

With your cards and images prepped, either digitally or by hand, you wait until the appropriate hour as taught in electional astrology, then print or ink the images. Write your legal and magical names on the backs of the cards—that is, what will be the “inside”. Blend or grab your incense that you will use to suffumigate the talisman. Trace the edge of one of the cards with your glue and sprinkle the incense blend inside it. Place the other card on top, make sure it seals all the way around. Suffumigate and incant as the ritual calls for. I also tend to finalize the concecration with a drop of Abramelin oil.

This is how I produce paper talismans that are still effective almost six months out. Checking and recharging these talismans is becoming a part of my Full Moon rites, along with my active sigils.

1 – I am, in fact, the exact kind of learn-at-my-own-pace system-hacker he despises. My saving grace is probably that I keep my damn mouth shut instead of demanding that he pontificate at my convenience.

2 – I’ll assume you know how to format the pages and everything yourselves to make that work. If not, there are message boards for that.